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There's A Robot That Has Been Trained To Find Waldo In Seconds—Because Why Not?

Jonna Ivin
Aug. 13, 2018
Screenshot YouTube Redpepper

There isn't much fun in creating a robot to find Waldo for you but that didn't stop ad agency Redpepper from doing just that.

Part of the fun of the enormously famous Where's Waldo books created by English illustrator Martin Handford, is that children have to put in a little effort in to get the reward. Granted it's not much of an award, finding a skinny beanie wearing dude, but it's the challenge and perseverance that is the pay off. Well, not anymore.

Creative Technologist at Redpepper, Matt Reed, explained to The Verge how the process came about getting the robot with its mechanical arm to point out Waldo after on a couple of seconds of scanning the page. He says:

I got all of the Waldo training images from Google Image Search; 62 distinct Waldo heads and 45 Waldo heads plus body. I thought that wouldn't be enough data to build a strong model but it gives surprisingly good predictions on Waldos that weren't in the original training set.

Now if we could only understand why we need a robot to ruin all the fun.





What a killjoy!






But for some folks, put anything in front of them and they'll want it.




For a few Twitter users it wasn't that the robot found Waldo, but how it pointed him out that had them concerned.




Say good-bye to childhood fun.

H/T: Mashable, Popular Mechanic